Monthly Archives: July 2008

Post navigation

While I find it a commendable effort on Obama’s part to visit Israel, I don’t think it will work miracles in terms of votes. According to J Street, a Washington-based Jewish group, only 8% of voters listed Israel as one of their top two issues. More said the economy (55%) would be the most important factor in their voting decision. Granted, the recent trip to Israel was a boost for his public image–he’s being proactive about working toward a peace solution, and appealing to both Israelis and Palestinians. But his efforts are questionable and debatable – should America continue to appeal to Israel? Nevertheless, Obama needed this trip to show McCain he can handle foreign policy, and, at the very least, it distanced him further from radical former pastor.

Go question the wisdom of “gay marriage” — you will be called a homophobe.

Go argue for stricter immigration policies — you will be called a xenophobe.

Go argue against Bush foreign policy — you will be called unpatriotic.

Go argue against rampant radicalism in the Islamic world — you will be called an Islamophobe.

Make a case for the humanity of the unborn — you will be called a sexist.

Or, try criticizing Obama — you will be called a racist.

I’m sure readers could come up with many more examples of such abuses. It’s a sad commentary on the state of American discourse these days. The ad hominem has become the principal weapon in political debate. It’s true for critics of Israel, and it’s true for everyone else, too.

What makes things tricky is that some of these bogeymen truly do exists — there are people who oppose immigration not for prudential reasons, but racist ones; there are people who hate Bush’s policies not because they’re flawed, but because they hate the U.S.; and there are people who criticize Israel — while giving her Arab neighbors a pass for much more serious offenses — because of anti-Semitic animus.

The nature of politics today is that well-meaning people will be unfairly smeared, and sinister people will try to infiltrate legitimate causes. Complaining about it won’t do much good. We just need to make our cases as completely and transparently as possible — and hope fair-minded people will judge us accordingly.

Unfortunately, Rob things aren’t that simple when it comes to reasoned criticism of Israel’s controversial policies on settlement expansion, restricting political rights of many Palestinians, the use of preventive detention, and even the assassination of Palestinian leaders. Any criticism of these policies draws near maniacal rebuke from the Israel-Can-Do-No-Wrong lobby. And predictably, the smack down tag of Anti-Semite.

With an eye on the Israel can do no wrong crowd, Obama at times has sounded more fervently Zionist than many Zionists on Israel’s policies. It’s not Obama’s fault that he thinks this is what you have to do and say to get Jewish votes. He’s been cowed like others. The rub is that he’ll get the majority of Jewish votes anyway–even as a constructive critic of Israel’s polices.

Political coalitions often unite people who otherwise want nothing to do with each other. Thus, in today’s Democratic Party, we get one of the oddest of all coalitions — Jews, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic; and left-wing anti-Semites, who blame Israel (and Jews in American government) for all the world’s ills.

Enter Obama, whose base is his party’s hard-left wing (home of the party’s anti-Semitic minority), doing what all party nominees must do in the general election — moving to the middle.

Israel, whatever its faults, is by far the most rationale, humane state in the Middle East. And a would-be president ought to be able to say as much. But for Obama, it’s tricky, because doing so means alienating his fan base in the left-wing blogosphere.

Of course Barack Obama feels sympathy for ordinary Palestinians. He should. Most Palestinians want peace. And yes, Barack is speaking to the American Jewish community, trying to reassure us both that he isn’t a Muslim, and he loves Israel. Sympathy and policy, however, can be in conflict since ordinary Palestinians don’t control their own communities. Militants do.

Were Israel to go away, move en mass to Mojave (my people are a desert people), Sunnis would still fight Shiites and the Palestinians would not get the newly vacated territory.

An Internet posting some years ago was eloquent in its simplicity: “Does anyone doubt that if the Arabs put down their weapons, there’d be no war, and if Israel put down its weapons, there’d be no Israel?”

Barack Obama has been accused of a great crime – of feeling sympathy for ordinary Palestinians. To counter this charge, he has demonstrated on his current world tour that he will tilt more toward Israel than most Israelis would. Let’s consider a better way:

1. Consider the practical benefits of neutrality. When U.S. politicians conclude that God gave Israelites enduring control over Canaanites and Palestinian Arabs, the world criticizes our unfairness and we violate our own separation of religion and state.
2. Exhort Muslims from Morocco to Pakistan to get on the therapist’s couch and stop playing “vicarious victim.” They can do more to get Palestinians on their feet, but they often prefer to complain.
3. Even if we remain “Israel’s good friend,” we can critique it constructively. Many Israeli citizens are such critics, and they are not “mere self-loathing Jews.”

Dan Rather slips here and refers to Obama as Osama. And yet the Osama-loving, I mean Obama-loving MSM dismissed this Southern California prophet as a mere Fear Engineer when he said that Obama will hand the country over to folks like Obama. Eat some crow, you silly doves.*

* nonliteralness disclaimer for the sarcasm-challenged.

On a less sarcastic note, I’ve long felt that the election will not go to a black liberal whose name rhymes with Public Enemy #2 (Public Enemy #1 always was Saddam, my more hawkish friends insist). Colin Powell, maybe. He’s a military heavy who rhymes with no discernible enemies.

While I would arrive at a different overall conclusion, I agree with much of what Rob has written about the gay-marriage debate below. It is true that many religious people have given up on the idea of sexual morality (or any other kind of morality, for that matter), but still get hung up on homosexuality for one simple reason: It doesn’t tempt them. And, oh, how much easier it is to condemn a temptation that I don’t care to commit than to confront the ones I indulge each day!

To quote a column I wrote back in 2005:

Yet the problem for defenders of traditional marriage is that their message sounds terribly anachronistic in our post-sexual-revolution age, which has turned the traditional notion of marriage on its head.

These days, sex outside marriage is common, and child-rearing outside marriage is hardly unusual. The combination of cohabitation, contraception and widespread fatherlessness has, in the public consciousness, all but obliterated the idea that marriage and child-rearing are inextricably linked….

And what about other qualities traditionally associated with marriage? Monogamy looks like a quaint cultural artifact in the days of “Desperate Housewives” and “American Beauty.” Permanence? Not in an era of no-fault divorce laws, in which as many as half of all marriages end in divorce, many in the first few years.

This is why defenders of traditional marriage are easily branded — and not always unfairly — as homophobic. The only element of traditional marriage too many are willing to defend is the one that doesn’t impinge on their own predilections, namely its restriction to heterosexual couples. For all the worthy efforts to enact constitutional gay-marriage bans across the country, you don’t see anywhere near as much desire to bolster marriage-preparation programs, tighten up divorce laws or remake a popular culture that celebrates promiscuity and “sexual freedom” over commitment, responsibility and sacrifice.

After all, it’s easier to lay the blame for the sad state of modern marriage at the feet of gays and lesbians than to accept personal responsibility.

Gay activists are right when they observe that the institution of marriage is crumbling, and it’s heterosexuals who are to blame. They are also right to claim that gay unions won’t destroy the institution of marriage. On the contrary, should the day come — and by all indications, it’s coming soon — when America puts traditional marriages and gay unions on the same legal plane, it will not be because of some homosexual plot, but because heterosexuals have managed to obscure almost all that was unique and important about traditional marriage in the first place.

But as woefully short of the marriage ideal as we may currently fall, the need for the ideal couldn’t be more severe. A generation of fatherless kids, of dysfunctional homes, of children lacking proper care and role models, has taught us that societal tinkering with foundational institutions comes at a steep price. It has taught us that rendering marriage little more than a public blessing of one’s private choices is a recipe for social disaster.

In short, I don’t think “Well, we’re already so far down the slippery slope anyway,” is a good reason to take another step. But Rob is right: As long as defenders of “traditional marriage” keep firing away at homosexuality, without seriously confronting the far more prevalent, far more serious threats to marriage, they will continue to undermine their credibility — and continue to lose the broader culture war.

Well, I guess Patrick O’Connor, the talented cartoonist for the Daily News and Friendly Fire, is no longer “our very own.” Now he belongs to the ages. His satire of the New Yorker’s satire of American fears about the Obamas was picked by the New York Times for their Sunday selection of the best of the week. Way to go, Patrick!

A new Fields poll shows that Californians tilt toward allowing gay marriage. This will be seen as bad news by religious conservatives who believe they are doing the Lord’s work in upholding traditional views of marriage.

As someone who has gay friends and friends on the religious right, I find all this to be a puzzlingly high-schoolish issue.

Those who are exemplars of monogamous commitment and who detest promiscuity are trying to keep one community from practicing fully sanctioned monogamy. Those who should be celebrating their freedom from traditional rules are demanding, “I want a ball and chain too.” As a single person who is ambivalent about marriage, I imagine that one solution to all the political fighting would be to allow gay marriage but to outlaw divorce. That would make many gays say, sensibly, “who needs marriage?”

As for religious conservatives who believe that they must ensure that marriage is a sacred, lifelong union of one man and one woman in order to raise a stable family, I am not sure why they put more importance in protesting gay weddings than in protesting Brangelina, who has done much to popularize infidelity, divorce and shacking up within the straight community. I believe the answer is that the former is, at this point, still an easier target. But this will inevitably change.

Traditional morality and the “clear” teachings of Scripture meant that conservative churches frowned on divorce and remarriage just a generation ago. Now, pastors themselves can divorce and remarry while pontificating about how gay marriage undermines Biblical authority. A conservative friend, commenting on the ongoing battle among Presbyterians on gay ordination, complained to me last night about how his church allows practicing gays into membership. I told him that his church doesn’t bar from membership or even leadership those who engage in various forbidden activities such as gossip, slander, gluttonous materialism, hatred toward others, and so on.

The difference is that, in such religiously conservative communities, there is great empathy for such persons — they are “sinners like myself.” But to them, gays are “sinners totally unlike myself.” The reaction is a more visceral, “Ew, how can anyone do that?” That’s why they have come to accept divorce but not homosexuality, even though divorce was more expressly forbidden by Jesus and even though divorce has far greater ramifications for the majority of society.

I suppose that religious conservatives’ visceral reaction to “others” is something like my reaction to “saggers,” who are now being banned in Flint, Michigan. Ban the butts! But I also understand that some “sins” are a matter of taste, and that we are better off dealing with more substantive issues such as how to pay for a half-trillion dollar war.

Ultimately, until religious conservatives convince the rest of society that the yoke that they seek to place on others is no heavier than the one they place on themselves — and that it is not based on a matter of visceral personal taste — will lose political battles inside and outside their churches.